The April issue has an article entitled “Desktop R.I.P.” that enthuses breathlessly about “computing moving off your machine and into the cloud”. I talked to the reporter, Jason Tanz, for this article a couple months ago (real-time Wired isn’t). Tanz, whose byline suggests his most eminent qualification to do the story was writing a book about 
Salesforce.com is cited as an obvious poster child. Yet Salesforce has performed a complete u-turn from the article’s premise and has quietly rolled out Salesforce.com Offline Edition, a Windows client for their service. I assume they are quiet about it because they don’t want to have to change their “1-800 No Software” phone number, yet they can’t be competitive in sales force automation without enabling people to work on airplanes, in customer lobbies or if the service goes down.
The article also says the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is “challenging the primacy of the desktop”. There are lots of cool new devices out there but to suggest this one is leading the charge makes one wonder if the reporter’s next book is about Hip-Hop in Finland. The reviews have been terrible (the device, not the book).
But the most egregious foul comes in the big finale:
“Sites like wesabe.com offer a glimpse of the future. What if online services could see the trail of breadcrumbs people leave behind them on the Web? Privacy concerns aren’t likely to trump the ample benefits.”
Ironically, wesabe.com uses desktop software specifically to avoid the privacy and security risks of sucking your most sensitive data into the cloud. And they’re appropriately quite righteous about it.
The reality is the desktop is moving into the cloud and the cloud is moving onto the desktop. The winners will bring together the unique capabilities of both. The losers will cling dogmatically to one or the other.
4 responses
I agree — we chose to use the desktop Uploader app because it enables us to get around the limitations of a web-only app.Doing that allows us, as you say, to pull data onto the web that might not otherwise make it there, but given that a huge majority of our users choose to use the Uploader, they must like that model.Marc HedlundWesabe
Byte, circa 1994, was writing this story (http://www.byte.com/art/9410/sec7/art1.htm). It’s no more true now than then, though 13 years ago you can probably more easily forgive a different view of the future.
It seems that innovative web technologies such as AJAX and COMET are already bridging the gab between the desktop and the web user interface..Many web based CRM companies such as Netsuite and Salesboom.com offer AJAX-style user interfaces that is so innovative. Netsuite (www.netsuite.com) Salesboom (www.salesboom.com).some companies are also using COMET to keep a constant connection (session), this helps the servers to send data and messages in real time back to users without depending on users refreshing thier pages or making a new server connection. This particular usage of COMET is bound to turn CRM around!
Greg – for CRM in particular, Outlook seems to be emerging as the interface of choice, regardless of whether it is an on-premise deployment or cloud-based service. You get the critical offline capability, integration into the personal workflow and there are a few hundred million clients already deployed. Microsoft has done this internally and are seeing double digit percentage increases in the number of opportunities a sales rep can manage.